Ticket To Love

Acey sighed loudly.

Steph went to sit down on her bed, but the contents of two dresser drawers were piled there, so she nudged Acey over and sat down next to her. Now that the craziness had passed, Acey noticed, Steph was back to her calm, rational self. “Listen,” Steph said, “it’s not as if we expect to win when we buy lottery tickets. Not really. It’s just a dream.”

“But I thought it was us just now, finally. Didn’t you think it was us?”

Steph lay down. “Yeah. I thought it was us.”

Acey stayed silent for a few minutes, her heartbeat slowing from thumping to unnoticeable. “If we’d won, we could have hired a maid to clean all this up. Now we’re stuck doing it.”

Steph chuckled. “Let’s just be glad Ma and Dad are in Florida now. The sight of this place now would kill her.”

Acey smiled. “‘Annamaria Christina Corelli!’” she mimicked. “‘This place is a disaster!’ But, Ma, it’s Steph’s fault. ‘Stephanie Cara Corelli!’” Acey giggled. “Like our full names are supposed to scare us into picking things up.”

“My name did scare me in kindergarten,” Steph said. “Too many letters to learn to write.”

“At least Dad made it easier for me,” Acey said. It was true. Daunted by his elder daughter’s mouthful of a name, and perhaps with a part of him longing for a son, he nicknamed her A.C. Many years of her parents’ shouting it up the stairs had morphed it into Acey.

Acey grinned, but remembered a moment later that this was a somber occasion. Stretching her arms over her head, she said, “Well, whoever won, it’s still pretty cool that it’s one of us. Someone who lives here in Valley Stream.”

“Could be anyone. Could be an out-of-towner.”

“No,” Acey said. A plane passed low over their building, and she listened until she couldn’t hear it anymore before adding, “I just have a feeling it’s a neighbor. Someone like us. Someone who works hard and who’s probably kind of nice.”

“That does make sense. Bread and Milk isn’t exactly a tourist attraction. It’s probably someone we see in there all the time.”

“But who?” Acey tried to conjure up memories of anyone she’d ever noticed in there. The idea that the future millionaire had walked among them left Acey flummoxed. “Wow, I’m dying to know who it is now.”

“Maybe you’ll have to wait,” Steph said. “It was just last night, after all.”

“True. No one with thirty-five million dollars is going to just want to keep living a boring old life around here.” Acey sighed. “No one.”

Harry unwrapped his Italian hero and regarded it with love as it sat in its white paper nest. Salami pieces and shreds of provolone had fallen out of the thick sandwich, and oil was forming a little puddle around it. It was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen, and he’d just about seen it all.

Whenever a little corner of his heart began to yearn for his Texas life, whenever a section of his brain began to wonder if leaving behind everything he knew and coming to New York wasn’t a lunatic idea, Harry just went out and found himself a sandwich. New York tasted better than any place he’d ever been.

He hefted the huge hero to his face and his biceps actually strained. He inhaled the scent of the oil. Ah. He opened his mouth and took a tremendous bite of his new life. Oil dribbled down his chin. He grabbed one of the fifty-seven napkins the deli guy had tossed into his bag, wiped his face and picked up the remote. He flipped around before deciding on the local news.

He dived into his sandwich again and looked over it to numbers blinking at him from the TV screen. “These are the numbers,” the anchorwoman was saying, “that are worth thirty-five million dollars. So if you are a Bread and Milk customer and haven’t taken a good look at that ticket you bought yesterday, now might be the time.”

Harry ceased chewing, and the food just floated around his mouth as he sat, frozen. He felt something greasy run down his hand into his sleeve, but still he didn’t move.

Something about the newswoman’s voice. So happy. Delighted to be reporting what everyone must consider good news. Someone who wasn’t a millionaire yesterday is a millionaire today.

He looked at her smiling plastic face, now listening to the weatherman saying something about a warming trend. She doesn’t think at all that she just delivered the worst news of the day, Harry thought. The newscast before this story was undoubtedly filled with fires and famine, wars and woes. Clearly, they’d saved the “happy” story until the end.

Harry dropped the sandwich back onto the paper on the coffee table in front of him and sat back. He knew, knew for a sad fact, that the person with the winning ticket was the unluckiest person who ever lived. He, or she, didn’t know it now, and they wouldn’t know it when they were cut a nice big check, and they wouldn’t know it when they bought their new enormous mansion in Beverly Hills or the Hamptons or in the south of France. But slowly, over time, the money, the privilege, would turn them into something else, something not even human, something that was a danger to others.

Harry’s left leg twinged, and he glanced down at it. Encased in jeans, ending in a sharply pointed cowboy boot, it looked like any other leg. If he took off the denim, and peeled off skin, he knew he’d see an abnormality—a steel pin, the best money could buy, which was ironic since money was what sent him to the operating room in the first place.

He hated when he remembered. He tried not to remember, ever, but the littlest thing could set it off—a person at the bus stop on crutches, or a horse-race recap show on cable. Then his mind swirled him away from his living room or the street or wherever he was, and threw him back under his horse, the animal writhing and crying out in ceaseless pain, crushing Harry’s bones as it struggled and failed to get up.

Money, the bottomless money that was his birthright, the money he had tossed around full-time on ski slopes and cliff edges, had eventually ended the life of a beautiful animal. Lying in a hospital bed, reading a magazine account of those awful moments, Harry had wished it had ended his own, too.

Harry bolted up from the sofa and lurched into the kitchen, weighted down by his own memories. He stood in front of the refrigerator and there, under a magnet among photos of his sisters, was yesterday’s lottery ticket. He’d never bought a lottery ticket in his life. He’d even laughed a little bit at the irony while standing in line at Bread and Milk. But he’d wanted to pick one up for Joe, his downstairs neighbor, who was in Boston this week visiting his daughter. Joe had spent the better part of last weekend helping Harry fix his air conditioner. He’d refused payment so Harry, knowing Joe religiously played the lottery, figured the least he could do was offer to pick him up a ticket. “I’d appreciate it, man,” Joe had said with a grin. “I’ll throw you a couple mil if I hit.” Harry had winced at the irony—he could’ve thrown Joe a couple mil any day of the week. But he bought the ticket.

He looked at it now. The first number was eleven. He remembered a four on the television. So that was that.

The eleven seemed to stare back at him. One-one. Like two people, two identical people, standing side by side. Like Harry and the new millionaire. One person nearly destroyed, and one person about to be. Harry slid the ticket out from under the magnet and went to toss it in the trash, but for some reason, he couldn’t let it drop out of his hand. Instead, he just folded it over so he didn’t have to see the eleven, or any of the other numbers, and tacked it back up to the fridge. He opened the fridge, grabbed a can of root beer and carried it back to the living room.

His sandwich was there, at least as appetizing as before. His life here was okay. He could handle an occasional reminder, as long as he didn’t dwell on it, he told himself. He grabbed the remote and changed the channel, and found talk of the lottery on the competing news station.

“I can’t wait to see who it is,” this woman was bubbling to her coanchor.

“I can,” Harry told her, picking up his hero again. “That poor, unlucky slob.”

Chapter Two

A cey was late for work, which was why she was running.

Acey loved her cute little slide-on white sneakers, which was why she was wearing them.

But her cute little sneakers were not meant for running, which was why, halfway to work, she fell.

She picked herself up from her sprawl across the hard, scratchy sidewalk, wincing. She examined her knee, now dirty with a thin rivulet of blood trickling down her calf.

“Are you all right?” she heard a man ask behind her.

“Oh, yeah, I just love falling on my butt in pub—” she raised her head and looked up at the man “—lic.”

“Don’t worry, it’s hardly public,” the man said. “No one’s around. Can you stand?”

I’m not sure, she thought. If she had already been standing, she would have gone weak in the knees with one look at this guy.

His hair was—well, she would have guessed light brown, but a bit of angling sunlight lightened it to the color of Long Island’s South Shore sand. The short strands were silky. Acey wished she knew what shampoo he used. His chin appeared chiseled from Italian marble and his lips were curved in a wide smile. His eyes were blue. Very blue. Bluer than the bluest crayon she and Steph had ever fought over, and his long, long eyelashes curled away from his profile.

“I can stand. I didn’t break anything. Just skin,” she finally said. The man took her hand, which was shaking a little bit, as she rose to her feet. She winced again. “Oh, it stings. I hate these sneakers. They always make me trip.”

“Why do you wear them, then?”

“Because,” she said, smoothing down her top, “they’re cute.”

“Ah.”

“But now they’re filling up with blood, which isn’t very cute.”

“Listen, come into my apartment. You can wash your knee and bandage it up.”

Come into his apartment? Oh, no. She’d learned a thing or two watching the news with Steph.